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New Analysis Pushes Back Possible Origin For Antikythera Mechanism
We've mentioned several times over the years the Antikythera Mechanism, the astounding early analog computer recovered from a Greek shipwreck in shape good enough to allow modern recreations. The device has been attributed to different Greek mathemeticians and thinkers, such as Archimedes, Hipparchus, and Posidonius, but as reader puddingebola writes, "Current research suggests its origin may be much earlier, and its working based on Babylonian arithmetical methods rather than Greek Trigonometry, which did not exist at the time. Puddingebola excerpts from the NYT article:
Writing this month in the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Dr. Carman and Dr. Evans took a different tack. Starting with the ways the device's eclipse patterns fit Babylonian eclipse records, the two scientists used a process of elimination to reach a conclusion that the "epoch date," or starting point, of the Antikythera Mechanism's calendar was 50 years to a century earlier than had been generally believed.
Difference being that relativity was mathematically deduced from a simple set of hypotheses.
Are you saying that archeologists don't follow scientific method? Because that is not how I have experienced archeology. Archeologist have to construct hypotheses based on certain evidence and then set out to prove them like everybody else. Of course you can't obtain your proof sitting on your ass in an air conditioned office deducing mathematical formulae, you have to go out and dig around in the dirt to find you proof. If an archeologist finds marble sheets in Roman ruins around Europe and the the Middle East bearing clear saw marks he can go with conventional wisdom which for a long time would have had us believe these slabs were produced by slaves using bronze hand-saws in painstaking and wasteful manual labour. However, an archeologist, with a bit of imagination might note that the slabs are a bit too uniformly sawed to have been produced by hand and he might also recall from conversations with his colleagues in the department of history that there are plenty of accounts in ancient sources pointing to sophisticated machinery being used in ancient times even though these accounts are often dismissed as fantasy or written off as references to grain mills etc. So taking the risk of applying a bit of imagination to the scientific process the archeologist could perhaps hypothesise that the Romans weren't stupid and that it is likely they developed the process of sawing stone to a high degree of technological sophistication. He could then go and try to confirm that hypothesis by looking for remains of stone processing facilities like, say the stone saw mill at Gerasa in Jordan where large blocks of half sawed marble blocks have been found with several parallels saw marks in them. This site and others like it demonstrates conclusively that the stone was being mechanically sawed into sheets of marble using water wheels at least some 1300 years before the industrial revolution. While I'm sure that mathematics is more logical, rigorous and absolute than many other disciplines of science I'm pretty sure that Einstein in particular with his numerous and fascinating thought experiments found plenty of room for imagination in his work.